Jam Read online

  At the very moment he said the word bit, I became aware of a whistling sound, and my tea-tray chest plate shuddered violently, as if I’d been shoved by a gorilla with unusually dainty hands. A slightly bent arrow spun end over end in the air and clattered to the floor.

  I sprinted across the open lobby and slid under the first piece of cover I could see—the chest-high wall from which Crazy Bob had looked down upon the lower levels of the mall. I looked behind me and saw that Tim and Angela had simply hopped over the counter and crouched there, a much nearer and sensibler option.

  If I looked to my right I could see Don pressed up against the back of the column halfway down the staircase. His face was so pale he looked like a marble bust wearing a colander.

  “Y!” shouted Tim from his position of safety. “IT’S US! WE PULLED YOU OUT OF THE HELICOPTER!”

  “THAT WAS MOSTLY ME!” I shouted, opportunistically.

  The mall fell silent. I wondered if he’d realized his mistake and was preparing some kind of apology. Then I caught a glimpse of movement just above the five-story abyss down to the food court, and one of the long cloth banners that hung from the ceiling fluttered back into place, as if someone had just been swinging from it like Tarza—

  Two thick leather soles thudded ominously onto the level below, cutting through my thought processes like a pool-cue spear. At the bottom of the stairs, past Don’s shivering form, I saw a thickly built figure emerge from the pitch darkness like a muscle-bound bubble rising from a tar pit.

  Y was looking somewhat worse for wear. He was paler even than Don, and both his face and his naked arms and shoulders were soaking wet with sweat. His eyes started from their sockets and rasping breaths sawed in and out of his half-open mouth. If I’d seen him hitchhiking at the side of the road my foot would have reflexively pushed the accelerator to the floor.

  He began to slowly climb the stairs towards Don with the lumbering menace of a nightmare monster, shoulders hunched forward and catcher’s-mitt hands clenching and unclenching. Don attempted to back away, which proved surprisingly difficult while crouching on stairs.

  “Y,” he said, trying to sound calm. “How wonderful to see you. We were beginning to worry you might have . . . er . . . gone off your trolley. But I’ve only got to look at you to know that you’re completely rational, am I right?”

  In response, Y took hold of a hilt protruding from some kind of armpit holster and withdrew a combat knife easily as long as my forearm.

  Tim appeared at my shoulder. “Don!” he called down. “Don’t do anything to alarm him!”

  “You’re worried about HIM?!” called Don back.

  “He’s not in his right mind! You have to reason with him!”

  Y’s blade caught the moonlight for an instant. “Reason?!” said an incredulous Don. “Fine! Here’s my opening argument.”

  He swung his toy gun around and held down the trigger. The barrel spun up and a rapid stream of foam pellets noisily filled the air between Don and Y. Most of them bounced harmlessly off his treelike torso and seemed more to confuse him than anything else, until a single pellet found its mark, squishing itself against Y’s cheekbone and squirting its payload of liquid pepper spray directly into his madly widened eye.

  I heard Angela hiss in sympathy as Y dropped his knife, staggering back and clutching his face. Tim prodded me with an elbow. “Travis! Now! Subdue him!”

  In a panic I ran forward, holding the baseball bat overhead like a sledgehammer, and swung it down as hard as I could. He was already bent double, and the bat bounced straight off his pulsating back muscles. I glanced at Tim for further instructions.

  “Subdue him harder!” he offered.

  I brought it around for a horizontal swing, but it was stopped midway by Y’s open palm. His fingers clamped around the end like a Venus flytrap. He wrenched the handle out of my grasp as easily as he’d pull a greasy spoon out of his morning porridge, and I felt the end of the bat rattle disorientingly against the front of my helmet.

  Once my head cleared, I discovered that I was sitting slumped on the floor with my back up against an ashtray. Tim and Angela were leaning urgently over the railing, searching the shadows for Y. “Where’d he go?”

  “He just jumped straight off . . .” said Angela, obligingly. “Did he land in the jam?”

  “No, I think he swung off one of those banners again.”

  “Recent events indicate that Y may have gone banana sandwiches,” said Angela to her camera. “Tim, do you think it’s true about the drugs?”

  “What drugs?”

  “You know, the drugs they give to the military to keep them under control. Maybe he’s going through withdrawal.”

  “That doesn’t hold up for a second,” said Don grumpily, appearing at her side and uncomfortably adjusting the increasingly moist clothes under his plastic bags. “Military spending’s tightly controlled as it is without adding on several thousand tons of smack.”

  “Well, what other explanation is there for Y’s behavior?”

  “I dunno. Maybe he’s just run out of cigarettes. I looked like that most mornings when I was quitting.”

  “Did you notice his quiver?” said Tim.

  “What?” said Angela, confusedly swinging her camera back and forth. “You think he’s got the DTs, too?”

  “No, I mean, the arrow pouch on his back. It was empty. That’s why he came at us like that, because he ran out.” He waggled an index finger sagely. “That means we’ve got an advantage. We can bring the fight to him.”

  We watched him scamper excitedly around the lobby until he found what he was looking for: the arrow that had bounced off my chest plate. He brought it over, examining it carefully.

  “Bring the fight to him?” said Don incredulously. “I think we should be thinking of ways to take the fight as far away from him as possible.”

  “He’ll need to run off to make more arrows,” continued Tim. “If we can figure out where he makes them, we might be able to take him by surprise.”

  “Nice thinking!” said Angela, taking the arrow off him and holding it up to the moonlight like a cashier checking a banknote. “It’s definitely varnished,” reported Angela. “He probably carved it from a piece of furniture.”

  “But it wouldn’t be from the department store,” said Tim. “Or anywhere else where there are a lot of people around.”

  “You really aren’t listening, are you,” said Don. “You’re all just tuning me out. This is actually quite liberating.”

  “Look at this,” said Angela, holding the arrow for all to see. It was, indeed, varnished, and the arrowhead appeared to be part of a brass hinge that had been laboriously folded and filed to a point. Angela was indicating a small nodule of wood about two-thirds of the way along the shaft. “Is that a nipple?”

  “Do you know, I’ve fantasized about cutting the throats of every single one of you while you sleep,” said Don dreamily, supporting his chin on his fists.

  “It’s definitely a nipple,” said Tim. “Maybe from some arty wood carving?”

  “Christ, you people are dense. He’s in that exotic furniture shop on level three with all the carved wooden Buddhas in the window.”

  “He must be in the exotic furniture shop!” said Angela, snapping her fingers. “You know, that place on level three. The one with all those carved fat guys in the window.”

  —

  The shop was called the Knickknackery, and it had been run by two middle-aged women who had a habit of wearing mystically themed velvet dresses better suited to people with waists around two feet narrower. There were, indeed, Buddha carvings in the window, along with figurines of various religious characters and fertility symbols that had always made me too embarrassed to walk past the place in tight-fitting trousers.

  It was one of the shops on the narrow walkway that ran partially around the third-level perimeter, directly above the jam-filled food court. The path was narrow, with just three or four feet separating the shop fronts fro
m the railing, and it was a good spot to bottleneck an invading force, if my experience with strategy games made me any judge. We were practically approaching the shop in single file, in our now-standard formation, with Tim in front and Don at the rear.

  Tim held up a hand to stop us a few feet from the Knickknackery’s nearest window. The shutters had been forced aside, which had almost certainly been the work of the plastic people, but the partial bead curtain that hung over the doorway was still tangled and swaying gently from someone recently barging their way through.

  Tim half turned, back pressed against the window, and patted me on the shoulder for attention. He put a finger to his lips, then moved his hand in a sweeping gesture, then pointed to his eyes with two fingers, then jerked a thumb towards the shop.

  “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  From inside the shop I heard the sound of tools being thrown down, a table being kicked onto its side, and a large, muscular body moving into a holdout position.

  Tim’s shoulders untensed. “Well, the first bit meant be silent,” he said. “And the rest of it’s academic, now.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Y!” shouted Tim. “Listen! We just want to talk, okay? The Hibatsu people put you up to this, right? You can stop killing us. I’m going to take command of the plastic people and I’m going to offer peace to the Hibatsu settlement. Just stop what you’re doing, come out slowly, and we’ll go back there together to negotiate. Sound good?”

  Y made no response. The four of us passed a tense look around. “Maybe he’s thinking about it,” said Angela.

  “Look, we have an opportunity to be uniters, not dividers,” called Tim, switching on his newfound politician voice. “If you keep this up, everything that’s left of this city will be consumed by chaos. Is that what you want?”

  The entirety of the shop window behind us immediately shattered. We threw ourselves to the floor as broken glass rained noisily down and an ornate wooden globe flew over our heads into the jam.

  “Okay, screw this,” said Don. He immediately scrambled forward to take cover by the other, still-intact window.

  “Don’t separate!” cried Angela.

  “Don’t pass in front of the—” added Tim.

  It was too late. Don was already framed momentarily in the doorway, and he was immediately hit by one of Y’s wooden arrows, fired with lightning reflexes. The arrow struck his shoulder and immediately shattered into strings, failing to even penetrate his plastic armor.

  “The hell?” said Don, astonished at his continuing life. “Is this balsawood? You running out of materials in there, dipshit?”

  In reply, a life-sized wooden statue of the Virgin Mary came flying horizontally out the door, smacking into Don with the force of a divine wrecking ball. He was flung off his feet and fell backwards over the railing. We heard the squelch of happy jam.

  “Don!” yelled Angela.

  “I’m okay,” came his slightly pained voice. “I landed plastic first. I think I’m just going to wait here. You’re on top of this, right?”

  “And then there were three,” muttered Tim.

  “We’re certainly putting the pressure on Y,” said Angela, on all fours, trying to film into the broken shop window without exposing herself. “He’s losing his usual finesse.”

  Experimentally, Tim held the nose of his flamethrower upwards until it would have been visible from inside through the broken window, at which point it was almost knocked out of his hand by a much sturdier hardwood arrow that went spinning into the jam.

  “We can’t do anything while he’s in a strong holdout position,” said Tim, who also played strategy games. “We need to flush him out.”

  “Where’re we going to get that much water?” I asked.

  Tim rubbed his eyes, exhausted. “Okay then, we’ll just do something that makes him leave the shop.”

  “Yeah, that’s a much better idea,” I said.

  “I’ll just blast a bit of fire into the window, just as a warning,” thought Tim aloud. “Give him something to think about.”

  “Are you sure you want to surprise him?” said Angela. “He might do something sudden.”

  “Good call. HEY! Y! I’m just going to fire off a warning shot now!” He touched the triggers. The first snapped the barbecue lighter on and the second depressed the aerosol cans.

  Tim conceded later that spraying fire at a shop full of wood, varnish, curtains, and strange hippie chemicals probably hadn’t been the great idea it had seemed like at the time.

  The ball of flaming gas dispersed around the top of the shop window display and set light to a billowing purple curtain that was attached to the ceiling. It had probably been bought from the same sort of place that all the children’s pajamas on the torches had come from, because the fire swept along it like the Mongol hordes across the plains. This turned out to be the chintzy and tasteless fuse for the gigantic incendiary bomb that was the Knickknackery as a whole, because the entire interior was quickly bathed in flickering yellow light.

  “Oh, shit,” said Tim. “SORRY!” he yelled over the roar of the inferno.

  “Y! GET OUT OF THERE!” advised Angela. Smoke was pouring from the door and broken window and we could no longer see anything inside but a merciless lake of fire.

  “Should I grab a fire extinguisher?” I asked. The mall had been diligent on health and safety and I could see at least four just from our current position.

  Tim considered this. “I see what you’re saying, but I think that might send out mixed signals. Don’t want to confuse the guy.”

  “I can’t see him,” said Angela, now carelessly on her feet and standing at the doorway, scanning the raging interior. “He might need help!”

  We all jumped in fright as the other window shattered outwards. Y burst out in a midair storm of glittering fragments, surfing on what appeared to be an emergency exit door torn off its hinges. Some of his pouches and bits of webbing were still burning, but he either hadn’t noticed or had felt they would look more intimidating, which was certainly the case.

  Even before his door had finished clattering to the ground, Y launched himself off it and made for Tim, who was nearest. In one smooth movement, he grabbed the end of the flamethrower in one hand and drove the elbow of his other arm into Tim’s throat. Tim fell backwards, choking on his own cartilage.

  After that, Y had his back to me. I knew I’d never have a better opportunity, so I made to wrap my arms around his treelike neck. He sensed me coming and effortlessly ducked out of the way, flipped my helmet off my head with one hand, caught it with the other, and shoved it into my solar plexus as hard as he could. I joined Tim on the floor.

  That left Angela. She took up her double-bladed pool cue with her nonfilming hand and jabbed it clumsily towards the advancing figure. I didn’t even see him move. I saw him raise his right arm, then I think I must have blinked, because the next thing I saw was Y holding the spear and Angela midslump.

  “What’s going on up there?” yelled Don from below. “Have you retarded him to death yet?”

  Y skipped nimbly to the rail and readied the pool cue to throw like a javelin. I heard a terrified squeak from Don’s direction. From my position on the ground I could see Don through the gap under the railing, standing waist deep in the jam with his hands over his mouth, metaphorically pinned to the spot in fear of soon being actually pinned to the spot.

  But then Y froze, the ends of the weapon quivering as he held it horizontally. His steely gaze was locked with Don’s petrified stare, but neither of them moved. He was like an actor freezing up as he forgot his line in front of an audience filled with his in-laws.

  Then I realized that one of the smoldering bits of his webbing had set Y’s ThunderCats pajama pants alight. His lower body was rapidly engulfed in a hellish pair of fire trousers. He collapsed onto his back and began slapping madly at the flames.

  “Put him out,” croaked Tim.

  I scrambled to Y, transitioning from crawl to upri
ght run on the way, and began stamping out the blazing parts. I was too flustered to notice exactly which blazing parts I was stamping out, and Y made a very curious noise when I felt my heel come down on the soft collection of objects around his lower trunk.

  A single blackened hand folded around both my ankles and pulled my feet out from under me. I landed spine first on the solid tiles and a wave of pain pushed all the air out of my lungs. There was a flurry of movement around me, and something warm and leathery fastened tightly around my neck. I felt a nice comfortable high as Y began to cut off the flow of blood to my head, but through the welcoming red fog an urgent bell sounded, and it occurred to me that Y was about to twist my head around like a difficult beer bottle top.

  “Y! Stop!”

  My head cleared like a balloon being let out as X’s shrill voice cut through the clouds.

  “Stand down. Let him go.”

  Y didn’t move, or reply. I could hear his heavy breathing in my ear, rattling coarsely in his throat.

  “That’s an order, sergeant,” said X, with slightly feeble menace.

  He let go. I scrambled over to Tim and had to stop myself from clinging to his leg. Y was on his knees, hanging his head, having fallen into standby mode like a Terminator with his head chip removed.

  “What the hell is going on?” said Angela suddenly. “Who are you people really working for?”

  X was kneeling in front of Y, stretching his eyelids out to check his pupils. She hung her head, heaved a deep, quivering sigh, and turned to Angela. “What?”

  “Do you deny that you’ve been having him . . . silence people since the moment we arrived at this mall?”

  “He’s not silencing people!” insisted X. “He’s just following the orders I gave him!”

  “To silence people?” said Angela, losing self-confidence in the face of X’s emotion.

  “All I did was give him standing orders to establish a firm position with whatever party held the most sway. It’s those lunatics at the Hibatsu building. They promised him a free ticket for us both if he did what they told him to. And they told him to come and . . . do this.”

  “So why’s he trying to kill us?” asked Tim. “And why didn’t he kill Don when he had the chance?”